Tuesday, April 18

Rembetiko of the Month

I was going to post a great tune by Rita Abadzi, actually the song that was my first real introduction to Rembetika as an adult—as opposed to the Greek music I was exposed to as a child, which might have included Rembetika, but I don’t really remember because I didn’t think too much about it at the time. It’s a good one, and was going to be my first Rembetiko of the Month featuring the Piraeus School, to which I’ve alluded.

Instead, this month’s Rembetiko of the Month is Ή Ελένη ή Ζωντοχήρα (Helen, the Divorcée), also in the tradition of the Piraeus School. It was recorded by Andonis Kalivopoulos (pictured right) with Yiovan Tsaous on what some have deemed a saz, others a tanbur. What Outiboy and I think is being played here is a bouzouki with movable frets, which was not uncommon in Rembetika from the Interwar period.

The principal reason why we think it’s a bouzouki with movable frets is the F half-sharp. Imagine the note between F and F#. This is one of the quartertones I was talking about in this post. A bouzouki with fixed frets (which is the kind played by Greeks today) wouldn’t be able to produce an F half-sharp. While the saz and the tanbur have movable frets that would have allowed them to produce a half-sharp, the instrument in this particular recording has a distinctly bouzouki-like sound.

The makam is Oussak, which is like a (Western) natural minor except for the half-sharp, a note that I am unable to produce on the sandouri. As a result, I play Oussak the way most Greeks do, as a natural minor with a flatted second thrown in on ocassion as an approximation of the half-sharp (the symbol for which is to the left).

Tsaous plays the F half-sharp, and it’s wonderful. The tension it adds to the melody is, well, it’s sexy. It’s really perfect for this song, which is all about sexual tension. Eventually, as Rembetika became more Westernized, notes like F half-sharp became less and less common, until they disappeared altogether.

As this song amply demonstrates, the Piraeus School produced a harsher and grittier sound than the Smyrnaïc School. While both Schools were associated with the Anatolian Greek refugees that flooded Greece after the Asia Minor catastrophe of 1922, it was the music of the Piraeus School that eventually came to define the Rembetic tradition, though this was perhaps more true in Greece than it was for the Greeks of the Diaspora, especially in the United States, but that’s a topic for a future post.

I chose this song because of the last line (about the roasted lamb), seeing that Sunday is Greek Orthodox Easter.Click here to listen.

hi jim-i've had a heck of a time with music hosting. putfile didn't work for a lot of folks period, and filelodge has temporarily limited its uploads to 2mb! i used file cabin for this song and i really, really hope you can listen to it. the f half-sharp is going to strike you as really edgy at first, though if you've ever listened to any classical persian music, you'll have heard some of the semitones i'm referring to.

when i clicked on the song link, it did take forever to load, but it did play eventually, so be patient. happy listening, and let me know what you think :)

alan,windows media player should be downloadable for free. it's a pretty innocuous process. i suspect that even if i emailed the mp3, you'd still need windows media to play it. do you have real player? it's also a free download. what do you normally use to play music files on your computer?

First a word of appreciation for the warmly sympathetic qualities of your presentations of 'rebetika'. Secondly - I think you might like to know about Iovan Tsaous's instruments. I had the opportunity of holding the two surviving ones in my hands in 1976, in the home of his wife's nephew. They are what Tsaous himself called 'sazi' and 'baglamas', and were unique instruments, custom made for him in Piraeus. They don't have moveable frets, but fixed metal frets, including 3 or 4 extra frets for the untempered intervals. I can furnish you with some pictures if you're interested.

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